Volleyball Guy’s last led class at Starbucks. Lots of folks there. Many come every week. I don’t know how many, if any, consider themselves Ashtangis. My impression is that they just come to the Saturday led class. Either way, it’s a bunch of people who are fun to practice with and to chat with on a weekly basis. I will be curious to see how many come over to the new studio. A good number, I hope.

Class was nice and steamy. As I set up for janusirsasana B on the second side, there was a ping in my left sacrum. No pain. But still, it kind of freaked me out. Now, post-class, it is a little sore. I took some ibuprofen to try to get ahead of any inflammation, and I’m going to ice as soon as I finish this post. A best case scenario is that my sacrum was fused (and I believe it was in the David Coulter anatomy book that I read that most adults probably have fusion of the sacral joints) and the ping was it unfusing. Yes, that’s the thought I’ll go with.

The left side of my lower back has always been my “problem” side: if I ever feel back pain, that’s where it is. When I first started kapotasana, I was waking every morning with my left lower back just aching up a storm. Wonderfully, all pain and stiffness has been absent this past week. It was kind of interesting, too, because once it was gone, I recognized that I’d had a baseline of stiffness for so long that I wasn’t even conscious of it until it disappeared. Okay, so we’ll take the ping as an opening, part of the greater transformation.

I lay in savasana, visualizing and reassuring myself that I am just fine. Immediately started having climbing flashbacks. Any time I slipped on a climb, or felt sketched, or thought I was going to die, I pushed the feeling into my left lower back. No idea why. Guess it’s about keeping the fear in my back pocket, so to speak. I couldn’t freak out in the moment, that would have been too dangerous, so I just pushed all the fear behind me.

Class ended with the traditional bow and namaste, and then spontaneous applause broke out. It went on for a long while. Volleyball Guy was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, and he bowed to us and just waited for the noise to die down. “I’m just going someplace else,” he said, “It’s not like I’m dying.”

Tomorrow at 10: improv class. Woohoo! Can’t wait to get into the new shala.